The Effects of an ICT-Based Reading Intervention on Students’ Achievement in Grade Two

Abstract

A controlled quasi-experimental design was used to evaluate the effects of the use of MindPlay Virtual Reading Coach on participants' reading and spelling achievement. After attrition, participants included 170 students enrolled in eight second-grade classrooms (four classrooms in each school) in two public elementary schools in the southwestern United States. MANCOVA analyses revealed a significant main effect (λ =.668, F [5, 161] = 16.014, p < 0.001, multivariate η² = 0.332) of the intervention favoring treatment group participants, a result that was confirmed across three of the study's five dependent variables.

Notes

While Mitchell and Fox (2001) found no significant differences favoring the ICT-based reading intervention group when compared to comparable teacher-delivered intervention group, they did find significant differences favoring the ICT-based reading intervention group when compared to a no-treatment control.

This study (Campuzano et al., 2009) contained data from the second cohort of a larger study performed by Dynarski et al. (2009).

While phonemic awareness and phonological awareness are sometimes used interchangeably, phonological awareness denotes the understanding of the sound system of spoken language more generally; phonemic awareness refers to the ability to detect and manipulate the smallest perceptually distinct units of sound (e.g., the ability to discriminate between /p/ and /b/ in the words pat and bat) in a spoken language (Pufpaff, 2009).

Among the recommendations of Torgerson (2007) and Torgerson and Zhu (2003) was the conduct of randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Owing to the small sample size in the present study, it was not possible to perform random assignment to groups at the classroom level. Therefore, the authors elected to statistically control for pre-test differences between groups.

This reclassification process occurred when students achieved a satisfactory level of English-language proficiency per standardized testing.

Data were derived from district publications. A reference to the source of this data has not been included, so as to protect the identity of participating schools.

Data were derived from district publications. A reference to the source of this data has not been included, so as to protect the identity of participating schools.

Copies of these instruments were provided to the researchers by the publishers prior to publication and public release.

The authors chose to create a single pre-test achievement covariate, rather than add the pre-test achievement scores for each dependent variable a separate covariate to the multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) model. This decision was taken to reduce the number of variables added to the MANCOVA model, thereby increasing statistical power.

Data analyses were performed using IBM SPSS GENERAL LINEAR MODEL unless otherwise noted.

Rules of thumb for determining the magnitude of effects were derived from Rovai, Baker, and Ponton (2014).